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by William Easterly

  This is not to say that the West was the only driving force that created bad governments in the Rest—this would exaggerate the West’s negative impact just as the White Man’s Burden exaggerates the West’s positive potential. There was plenty of despotism and vicious politics before the West ever showed up. Nor is the West the only source of imperial conquest—remember, say, the Aztecs, the Muslims, and the Mongols?

  The colonialists left behind independent states with arbitrary borders that had little chance to build up popular legitimacy. Sometimes these governments comprised little more than an independence agitator, an army, and a foreign aid budget. Although they had shallow roots, the new states brought benefits to their new leaders. The new rulers could use the inherited colonial army to levy high taxes on natural resources or any other valuable economic activity, and they had a tradition of autocratic colonial rule and economic planning. It was not surprising that most of these new states were unfriendly to both economic and political freedoms.

  Sponsoring Native Autocrats

  To make things worse, colonial administration had reinforced autocracy. The preferred method of colonial administration had been “indirect rule,” relying on native rulers or intermediaries. Columbia University professor Mahmood Mamdani labels this system in Africa “decentralized despotism.” Indirect rule was inevitable given that the colonizers were unwilling or unable to put more than a few Europeans in the colonies to administer them. There were enough Europeans with power to mess up the pre-colonial arrangements (which were far from the blank slate Europeans presumed), but not enough to create anything resembling beneficent institutions. Destruction is always easier than construction.

  In 1893, the Covenanted Civil Service for India had only 898 positions for Brits to rule a continent of around 300 million. The entire Indian civil service (the rest of which was Indian) was 4,849 officials. After the Indian Mutiny in 1857, the government increased the number of British troops, but it was still only 78,000 by 1885 (to go along with 154,000 Indian troops).7

  Earlier, regarding the East India Company of the eighteenth century, Edmund Burke described how arrogant Brits messed up India: “a few obscure young men, who having obtained, by ways which they could not comprehend, a power of which they saw neither the purpose nor the limits, tossed about, subverted, and tore to pieces…the most ancient and most revered institutions of ages and nations.8

  In Africa, the ratio of Europeans to population was also scant.9:

  These few whites were not abundantly qualified to create new nations from scratch. They set low standards of performance, mitigated only by their consistent failure to attain them. A Belgian professor described Belgian colonial administrators in the Congo as: “too young and incompetent; they are sent out, without knowing the native language, without serious training, without a probationary period, to a distant place where they are usually alone. Isolated, powerless, able only with difficulty to leave their headquarters, they do not travel enough in their district, they do not get to know the villages.10 (Sort of reminds me of myself as a young World Bank official!)

  These raw recruits had to be “tax collectors, census takers, policemen, judges, agronomists, road builders, sanitationists, and wise counselors,” all while they were often sick. The Igbo in Nigeria derisively referred to British district officers as “student magistrates,” and performed masquerades in which “Government” was a faceless figure holding a sheet of paper.11

  Given these administrative limitations, the colonizers in Africa often relied on the “chiefs” to rule for them. But who were the “chiefs”? The colonizers, displaying a room-temperature IQ about the locals, didn’t know how to deal with the many non-chief societies in Africa. Igboland in Nigeria was a non-state society, with decentralized village self-government. Other examples were the slash-and-burn agriculturalists of northern Uganda and the pastoral communities of the East African Rift Valley. The British appointed chiefs anyway, sometimes choosing one of the village heads to rule over the others. In 1930 in Tanganyika, colonizers adapted the rule that “every African belonged to a tribe, just as every European belonged to a nation.” Officials said, “Each tribe must be considered a distinct unit…each tribe must be under a chief,” although “most administrators knew that many peoples had no chiefs.” Earlier German practice in Tanganyika had also invented chiefs. Understandably unhappy with outsiders imposing their leaders on them, Africans started two rebellions directly caused by “indirect rule”: the Maji-Maji revolt in Tanganyika and the rebellion against “warrant chiefs” (those “warranted” by the colonial officials) in Igboland.12 Women, who were among the main victims of the new order, led the latter revolt.13

  Even when chiefs existed, they had limited powers before colonial times. There were only loose confederations of the Akan peoples of Ghana, the Ashanti and the Fanti. The chiefs of these confederations had limited powers, acting with the concurrence of their counselors. A chief who acted on his own could expect to lose his throne. The colonizers took over the decentralized system of rule in Africa, yet removed the checks and balances on that rule. The restored Ashanti Confederacy of 1935 under the British lacked the counselors who had previously shared power with the chief. The confederacy quickly abolished “youngmen’s associations,” another traditional check on chiefly power.14

  A European observer in Nigeria noted, “The chief is the law, subject to only one higher authority, the white official stationed in his state as advisor. The chief hires his own police…he is often the prosecutor and the judge combined and he employes the jailer to hold his victims in custody at his pleasure. No oriental despot ever had greater power than these black tyrants, thanks to the support which they receive from the white officials who quietly keep in the background.15

  Thus Europeans may have actually increased despotism in Africa. According to Professor Mamdani, nowhere in Africa had there been “centralized judicial institutions with exclusive jurisdiction over an area,” which colonialism created as “customary.” The British governor of Sudan described his policy of restoring “tribal chiefs” as aimed at “making the Sudan safe for autocracy.16

  The Europeans delegated to the “chiefs” the collection of taxes and the supervision of forced labor. In the Buganda Agreement of 1900, the British gave the chief the right to assess and collect taxes, and to hand out justice. The chief was to draft one laborer for every three households for a month each year to maintain the roads. In French colonies, the chief’s duties included “collection of taxes, requisitioning labor, compulsory crop cultivation and provision of military recruits.” In the Belgian Congo, chiefs were to enforce “forced labor, compulsory cultivation, conscription, labor recruitment, and other state requirements.17 The chiefs often took advantage of their unchecked powers to collect extra taxes and labor for themselves. A missionary in German Tanganyika estimated the ratio of taxes the chiefs collected to taxes turned over to the colony as seven to one. In northern Nigeria, Lord Frederick Lugard, the British architect of indirect rule, tried to end abuses by paying the emirs a salary.18 Like later aid agency recommendations to end corruption by raising civil servant pay, the salaries did not stop the abuses. There was no reason to expect them to—in either case—without effective checks on the ability to extract loot. The Europeans kept their despots accountable, not to their subjects but to Europeans. In Buganda, the struggle with the Europeans over the Kabaka’s right to appoint chiefs forced the prime minister of Buganda to resign in 1926.

  When the French conquered the kingdom of Segu in what is now Mali in 1890, they deported the Tukolor rulers to Senegal, put in a chief from the friendly Bambara dynasty, subsequently questioned his loyalty and executed him, and then appointed a rival Bambara, before finally abolishing the chiefdom altogether—all within three years. Both the British and French indulged the urge to appoint “the right native” to colonial positions.

  University of Cambridge professor John Iliffe notes in his magnificent history of Africa that even the French
and Belgian system labeled “direct rule” in Africa was really indirect rule. While the French and Belgians were at the top of the pyramid, they appointed chefs de canton drawn from the local population (chosen as usual for their loyalty to the colonizers), who in turn relied upon village chiefs.19

  Despite the pretensions of the colonizers to control things, opportunistic locals easily bamboozled them. In Igboland, the elderly collaborators with the British rewrote “customary law” to their own advantage, often at the expense of women and the young. It was no accident that women led the revolt against chiefs in Igboland. Even European district chiefs who took direct decisions had to rely on native clerks and interpreters. One of the latter in Dahomey established his own court, in which he took bribes to reach a decision before presenting it to the colonial administrator, claiming “the white man will believe anything he says.” In Buganda, the chiefly allies of the British exploited the 1900 agreement to distribute the kingdom’s land among themselves.20 Like today’s donors and postmodern imperialists, the colonizers were outside Planners who could never know the reality on the ground. Like their modern-day counterparts, colonizers often unwittingly destabilized the balance of internal power.

  Before the scramble for Africa, there had been educated Africans who had some power in colonial regimes. Missionaries founded a university in Sierra Leone, the Fourah Bay College, in 1827. West Africans sent their children there, as well as to London law schools. Many of these graduates held positions in the colonial administrations, including legislative posts in the Gold Coast and Lagos as early as the 1850s. Educated Africans made up nearly half of the senior posts in the 1890s in these two colonies. After the scramble added interior territory to what had previously been coastal enclave colonies, the British and French betrayed their educated African allies. The colonizers decided they needed traditional rulers to hold the interior, and removed from power the educated Africans on the coast. Sir George Goldie of the Royal Niger Company in 1898 said power must be shifted from “the educated strata to traditional chiefs.” The educated turned in frustration to Pan-Africanist ideologies and later played an important role in independence movements. As if they had not created enough divisions already, the colonialists left behind a legacy of mistrust between the educated class and the traditional rulers. (A rare exception to this mismanagement of traditional rulers was Botswana, where the British left largely intact the traditional structures of the ethnically homogeneous Tswana tribes. The first president, Seretse Khama, had earned a law degree in Britain and was a traditional ruler.)

  Another consequence of favoring elderly traditional rulers under colonialism was the exacerbation of Africa’s long-standing generational conflict between young and old males. Professor Iliffe emphasizes that a persistent theme in Africa’s history was the scarcity of labor relative to abundant land, which led societies to maximize fertility. One institution to increase fertility was polygamy, which left older men and younger men competing for the same women. Indirect rule shifted power in favor of elderly autocrats by removing some of the checks and balances on them. In independent Africa, some part of the political conflict would turn out to be the revolt of younger males, who sometimes triumphed over their elders by their advantage at using political violence.21

  Some colonies outside of Africa also used indirect rule. The Dutch compelled native rulers in Indonesia to maintain coffee plantations and pay coffee tribute to them around the beginning of the nineteenth century, using forced labor.22 In Bengal, the British retained the landed aristocracy, the zamindars, to collect taxes for them, paying a fixed sum for a given area. They even appointed zamindars where there was no landed aristocracy to begin with, creating an elite from scratch. Today the formerly zamindar-controlled regions do worse on many development outcomes than other parts of India.23

  Elsewhere in India, the British had more direct rule, although they still delegated tax collection to Indian “collectors.” A system more akin to indirect rule operated in the more than six hundred princely states in India, where the British claimed “paramountcy” but were content to just leave a resident to advise the prince.24

  Beneficent but Crazy

  It is common to attribute the defects of colonialism purely to Western exploitation. Today’s nation builders would claim that they are more altruistic than the colonizers. However, there were humanitarian instincts at work during colonialism similar to those in today’s nation-building (just as there are some self-interested objectives today). Moreover, the specific problems created by colonialism seem to reflect more Europeans’ incompetence than their avarice.

  Certainly there was change over time from the era of annihilation of indigenous people and African slavery in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries to the more beneficent empires of the nineteeth and twentieth centuries, just as nation-building today is more beneficent than colonial rule. Kipling wrote “The White Man’s Burden” at the height of the imperial era in 1898. Before that, the British government ban on the slave trade in 1807 inaugurated a more humanitarian imperial era. The British agreed to take over Sierra Leone in 1808 from a chartered company, which had failed to make the country a haven for freed slaves (most of whom had died). The British acted out of humanitarian concern, including the desire for a base to prevent the slave trade. In Freetown, the British resettled slaves their warships had intercepted in transit. Christians back in Britain gave donations to support the Sierra Leone settlements. Like Save the Children later, the charity stressed the person-to-person link. For a gift of five pounds, the missionaries would baptize the freed slave on the receiving end with the name of the donor.25

  White imperial benevolence was a strong staple of propaganda back home to justify the colonies. Thomas Macaulay told the House of Commons during the debate on the India Bill of 1833: “[India will be] the imperishable empire of our arts and morals, our literature, and laws…. I see bloody and degrading superstititons gradually losing their power…. I see the public mind of India, that public mind which we found debased and contracted by the worst forms of political and religious tyranny, expanding itself to just and noble views of the ends of government.”

  The imperialists early on had ideas that would later become “development economics.” The governor-general of India from 1828 to 1835 spoke of the “improvement” of India, “founding British greatness on Indian happiness.26 A British commentator on India concurred in 1854: “when the contrast between the influence of a Christian and a Heathen government is considered; when the knowledge of the wretchedness of the people forces us to reflect on the unspeakable blessings to millions that would follow the extension of British rule, it is not ambition but benevolence that dictates the desire for the whole country.27

  The nineteenth-century economist John Stuart Mill saw the British empire as furnishing what sounds like a colonial combination of the Big Push and structural adjustment: “a better government: more complete security of property; moderate taxes; a more permanent…tenure of land…the introduction of foreign arts…and the introduction of foreign capital, which renders the increase of production no longer exclusively dependent on the thrift or providence of the inhabitants themselves.28 Refuting criticism that Manchester capitalists dictated imperial policy, Lord Palmerston said in 1863, “India was governed for India and…not for the Manchester people.29

  In India, the British doubled the area under irrigation from 1891 to 1938, introduced a postal and telegraph system, and built forty thousand miles of railroad track.30 Railways had been part of India’s “development plan” since the 1820s, the key to “opening up” the country to commerce.31 The Indian civil servant Charles Trevelyan in 1853 had told a Commons committee that railways would be “the greatest missionary of all.32 The development efforts were not any more successful than today’s foreign aid or nation-building, however: Indian income per capita failed to rise from 1820 to 1870, grew at only 0.5 percent per annum from 1870 to 1913, then failed to grow again from 1913 to independence in 1947.33
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  In the American empire in the Philippines, American teachers and their Filipino successors imparted at least a rough education, raising literacy and making English the lingua franca in the ethnically fragmented islands. Americans also contributed dams and irrigation facilities, mines and timber concessions, roads, railways, and ports, legal reforms, a tax system, and currency reform. They nearly wiped out cholera by teaching Filipinos to boil water, reduced malaria by controlling mosquitoes, and controlled smallpox by compulsory vaccination. They advocated increased production of rubber, hemp, sugar, tobacco, and lumber.

  The imperialists also built railways throughout Africa, using public money because of the lack of private interest (except in the Belgian Congo). The French built the first railway in Senegal in 1883. Later railways in French West Africa connected plantations in the interior to ports on the coast. The copper mines of the Belgian Congo shipped ore south after 1910, putting out a spur to meet the railways emanating from South Africa. The British empire planner Cecil Rhodes called railways and the telegraph “the keys to the continent.34 Railways reduced Africa’s ancient curse of high transport costs by as much as 90 percent.35 The advent of roads in the twentieth century reduced the transport cost from farms to railheads by a similar amount.36

  Among other benevolent actions, the French colonial minister Albert Sarraut launched a program in 1923 to improve general hygiene and medical care in the African colonies, including clinics, training centers, maternity homes, and ambulances. He aimed to enable the most deprived segment of the population in the remote bush to gain access to medical care. Other programs about the same time included “pilot farms” to disseminate agricultural knowledge.